Babachir Lawal: Nigerian professor blasts Buhari for clearing “corrupt” SGF
Nigerian media professor Farooq Kperogi has faulted President Muhammadu Buhari’s verdict on Secretary to the Federal Government, Babachir Lawal.
The Senate indicted Lawal of stealing over N200 million meant for feeding Nigerians displaced by Boko Haram. The government agency in charge of the funds said it used to the money to cut grass while spending a meagre N2 million in feeding IDPs.
Buhari has cleared Babachir of all wrongdoing, and Kperogi said that’s scandalous.
He wrote…
We have an “anti-corruption” president who blatantly lied just to defend the corruption of his close aides. In his letter to the Senate “clearing” Babachir David Lawal of multi-million naira “grass clearing” corruption, the president said the senate didn’t invite Lawal to defend himself. Lie. He WAS invited via a letter, which his secretary acknowledged, and via three newspaper adverts. But he spurned the invitation. The president said only three senate committee members signed the letter asking for Lawal’s resignation and prosecution. Another lie. Seven senate committee members did.
A man who knowingly and intentionally lies has no integrity. Worse, a man who defends the blatant corruption of his close aides while pretending to be fighting corruption involving his political opponents has no integrity. How can any person with even a smidgen of conscience defend a man who stole from desperately poor and vulnerable Boko Haram victims, a man who once publicly bragged about receiving monetary bribes from a governor, a man who is so corrupt he is tagged “cash and carry” in government circles?
This doesn’t surprise me, though. In my December 24, 2016 column titled “Tragicomedy of a corrupt anti-corruption government,” I wrote: “I was regaled with troubling tales of the mind-boggling corruption against close, loyal aides that [Buhari] swept under the carpet at the PTF, The Buhari Organization (TBO), and at the defunct CPC. Babachir Lawal was a dominant figure in CPC; he knows President Buhari well enough to know that nothing will happen to him for all his villainous rape of vulnerable IDPs in Borno and Yobe as long as he can impress the president that he is irrevocably ‘loyal’ to him.”
This is far and away the most hopelessly unjust government in Nigeria’s entire history.
